Thursday, 28 February 2013

A
barrier become a bridge. Will highlight as you cross and soon decay.

Converging
winds knit a temporary frozen micro-climate. Water-dwellers caught
half in half out. Freeze-thaw cracks ebmoss the stone. You can
briefly climb across, or through. Its bright. he floor is knives and
forks* of ice glimmering and glittering, casting back and fracturing
your light, blinding you and winding. Thaws in d4 hours and will not
freeze again for days.

SKYLINE
TRAVERSE

A
face-forward sidestepping crawl across the highest point.

Climbing
with your face against the rock, moving across with darkness falling
below. A roof crawl defined by its distance from the ground. A
half-foot path, a foot turned lengthwise takes up half the space, a
zig zag up. (At the top is someone selling something because everyone
has been here before.) Press your hands against the cave roof for
balance. Balance balance balance.

GUANO
FIELD

A
piled white desert of fossilised poisonous shit.

Bats,
birds or something worse. Cracks under your feet sometimes. Lots and
lots of flesh eating grubs. Baby bones everywhere, bird or bat being
devoured. It has their attention for now. Fungal infections,
Incapacitating smell. You weep yellow tears. Anyone who lies
bleeding in the dirt is fucked.. Now or later. Blinding chemical
dust.

ELEPHANT
SHAFT

Bends
and twists like an elephants trunk fiddling with a twig.

Elephant-sized,
you could throw one down. Tusk-curved stalactites line the walls
arranged in radial spirals like the saarlacs mouth. Tips vibrate with
distant hums and clue you in to secret falls. They quiver like tuning
forks and moan sadly. Remind you of things you forgot long ago. Two
small holes lead out, each going to a different path.

THE
PISTON

Poylhedral
cave, the exit blocked by a giant crystal.

Shape
of the cave is whichever platonic solid you pull blindly out of your
dice bag or pocket, tilted on its point. The crystal piston spikes
through like a brass tack pinning it to the ground. Vibrating like
giant quartz watch. Clues to the movement. converge with insane hums
like a galactic bee. Crystal stack shivering thumb-blurs like hornet
wings, growing like contractions. Humming and crackling. Goes
apeshit if you try to break it. Days sometimes. Possible truce area.
Tracks, fire pits, score marks on the walls. The test is waiting. It
will hover out rhythmically in d6 days, obeying hidden laws.

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

A
forced meander slows the river in a curl. The water drops organics.
Soil, seeds, chemicals and eggs. NITRATES. Nutrient-rich mulch
covered in pale, dying, sunless hypercharged plants. This soil hurts,
it writhes with biting life. As valuable, dangerous and desired as a
middle eastern oil field.

VOG-TORNADO-FALLS

Upwards
waterfall of boiling acid Vog. Encrusted with skeletons.

The
river plunges into a sulphurous lava pit, evaporates and boils
directly up. Condenses on the rotting roof, drips down and re-forms.
Bones everywhere, anything caught within dies. Handy if you need
bones. Surrounded with sulphurous mists. The most gothic thing ever.

SOLFATARA

Climbable
doughnut of toxic shards.

A
helix of crystals and toxic rocks around a smoking pit of chemical
fire. Like a passable cage of dripping blades. Climbable and
poisonous. Roof is full of chemo-maggot ratholes, crystals are piled
like a snakeskin shucked off in a narrow gap.

GROTTO
OF THE FARIES

Natural
gasses douse your lights.

Squat
globular cave hanging in its entry points like a ball in a cats
cradle of tubes. No speleothems. Ways in and out lead up. The
invisible gasses collecting here douse all burning flames and kill
you slow. Temperature gradient gives the clue, cold air near ground
may permit a spark.

MEGA-HELICTITES

Crammed
with crazed giant helictites

They
spiral like drinking straws left near a high heat. Flows of strange
viscosity inside. Must be climbed through like mad monkey bars.
Ignoring gravity, an empty space in the topographic core. Like a
calcite jungle with weird fluids oozing from the tips.

Tuesday, 26 February 2013

White fleshy blooms are crushing the cave, cupping hands around it's
centre like a throat.

The
rock is cracked and bulging like a paving slab broken from below. Touching the foamy mass makes it tremble and
close another radial foot. When the fungal valve seals the cave it
will bleed liquid stone. The fungal overmind has a very important
reason for doing this which you should immediately invent and keep
secret.

INVERSE
LAPAIZ

A
chain of huge, linked overhangs in the distant ceiling of a cave.

A
chain of broken half-tubes in a high roof. Possibly the relics of a
lava tube or collapsed river bed. The tube chunks must be leapt
between mario-style. The linier arrangement leads to a chimney or
crack in the cave wall that yakes you down, then back across the
floor below in the opposite direction. The ground floor is a new cave
type, roll again.

SUN
TEMPLE

An
enclosed space filled with light.

A
high ceiling and utterly clear, smooth walls that rise thirty feet or
more then bow out invisibly like a muffin top. The roof, far above,
is bright. Either semi-precious gems, or veins of burning tar,
reflective obsidian shards or prsim'd crystals. High, unreachable and
cascading light. It feels like entering an outdoor space. There is no
cover here of any kind and no-where to hide.

SULPHURBORN
CAVE

A
cave shaped from below by deep-earth chemistry.

This
cave has nothing to do with normal formations. It shape is wrong,
like a tear made of tears.
An entry to a stranger level of the world. One not shaped by
comprehensible life. Sulphur rots the rock. Walls are tooth-torn
gashes, scars of invisible claws, floor a ripple of rips like torn
chicken. Rivers entering will change after this point.

Saturday, 23 February 2013

The
path narrows. Your hands press the corridors slanting sides. The
floor falls away. A gap between your feet the width of a cat-flap or
horizontal letterbox. Inside the gap: nothing*. Your path transits
across the roof of a vast unseen cavern. Water far below. Its hard to
fall through a space that small. Its hard not to.

DOLLS
THEATRE

Stooped
cave shaped like the narrowing field of vision of a play.

A
low space. Bend over. Grows lower in one direction, widens out
opposite. Like giants crammed on a tiny stage. Floor covered with
artful speleothems. Tiny gypsum flowers, stalagtites and mites. Wild
miniature helictites. Like an impossible model landscape of a distant
space grown in alien rock and mineral shades. The audience zone is a
screaming abyss.

FRICTION
CLIMB (GRANITE)

A
simple convex slope at 45 degrees. No holds or marks.

A
huge chunk of unlikely granite. Smooth and impermeable. No pitons.
Convex like a spoons back and tilted. 40 + d20 degrees. Rough and
frictive. Can be balance-walked. If you slip, the rock will have your
skin or you will slide to your death. (Fall can be arrested with
soft-tissue loss. Yours or anyone you can grab in time.)

CRYOBRITE
BRIDGE

A
shitty bridge of flakey rock. Made by under-wizards and crypto-races.

Magic
evaporates stone to cryoclastic flow, wafts it into place and lets it
set. The result- a bridge of 'tuff' shitty flakey cakey yellow rock
in the shape of frozen clouds. Take years to decay. Are rarely safe.
Take you somewhere someone else wanted to go.

BOULDER
HALL

A
field of truck-sized barely-balanced rocks.

Flat,
high-ceilinged cave. Full of massive boulders. Gaps form a maze.
Touch one, it's chance of moving is 50%. If one slams another its
chance is 80%. They domino.

GRAND
EBLOIS

Building-sized
boulders crammed in a cave. Climb, then hop across.

The
cracks between too small to navigate. Fall down and you just have to
climb back. Hop the tops. Some mega-boulders shift if you fight on
them.

SKI
JUMP BOULDER FIELD

J-curve
slope with sparse rocks. Widowmaker on the peak.

A
sparse boulder field that curves like a ski jump. Teetering giga-rock
knife-edged at the top. Climbing up is hard, sliding likely. Anyone
next to the widowmaker has the nuke button.

Wierd
continent-scaled convections put an endless tornado at the centre of
this shaft. Boiling there like white DNA. A sargasso twister with
forgotten, fleshless, armour-bound bodies and knots of ancient rope
falling in and out of the stormcore over years. They go past fast.
Dont jump.

ANTIFOREST

The
ghost of a mighty forest. It's inverse shape.

Lava
swept over gigantic trees and cooled fast. The trees rotted leaving
basalt in a tree-mold shape. That chunk of land fell into the earth.
In real terms, tall, thin vertical caves in black rock. Linked by
numerous crawl-passages right at the top in every direction. (And
possibly the roots below.)

VIA
FERATTA

An
impossible climb made passable by ancient webs rusting iron.

A
cats cradle of climbs and crosses. Perhaps regular and
comprehensible, perhaps not. The air tastes of rust and blood and
broken batteries. Hope like fuck there's not a lighting strike
somewhere.

*If
anyone falls through the floor, drops their light but hangs on, take
them aside and tell them this. 'You look down between your kicking
legs and see your light fall fall fall for long long seconds. It
sparks and bounces, strikes something. The light escapes and the
burning oil highlights the side of an ebony ship. Briefly as the
black sails burn the firelight sculpts a model of its shape.
Tear-sized figures dash with tiny sticks waving bright tips. In the
micro-fragment of the infinite sea below, a pale pearl-coloured whale
breaches and swamps the ship. The lights go out. Hands pull you
back. Never speak of this again.'

Friday, 22 February 2013

I
have just finished Piers Macksey's The
War for America. So, for no particular reason, here are some of
my favourite parts. macksey writes a cutting and elegant assesment of character. Sometimes over pages, somethimes in one line.

Lord
North

“Neither
appearance, nor character, nor interests equipped Lord North to
dominate a war administration. His figure was clumsy and his movement
awkward. A large tongue thickened his articulation. Two prominent
myopic eyes rolled about in his face to no purpose, and with his wide
mouth, thick lips and inflated cheeks 'gave him the air of a blind
trumpeter'. His skills were those of peace. He was a man of culture
and personal charm; of patience for dull understandings, wit which
never wounded, humour which never ridiculed. He was proud of being a
good manager of the House of Commons, and few surpassed him in the
political art: the manoeuvre by which he jobbed his half-brother into
the bishopric of Winchester ranks high in the tactical annals of
patronage. Almost single-handed he defended his Ministry in
Parliament year after year against the bitter invective and
dialectical brilliance of a ferocious opposition. His knowledge of
the House, his accessibility, his even temper and his aptitude for
raising a laugh baffled and infuriated his rivals. But of war this
civilised man knew nothing: 'Upon military matters I speak
ignorantly, and therefore without effect.' He did not enjoy war; nor
was he ever confident of victory.”

This
man was Prime Minister for almost the entire length of the War of
Independence. He would hide in corners to avoid discussing things.
'The tactical annals of patronage' might be my favourite sentence in
the whole book.

Germain
– The American secretary and as close as Britain ever got to a
strategic head for the American war. Mackesy writes for several
lovely pages about this odd man but the most pertinent and powerful
is his final line “... for all his talents, he lacked the magic
gift of Pitt: the power to frighten and inspire.”

A
cabinet meeting -

“North
and Bathurst fell asleep at once, Hillsborough nodded and dropped his
hat. Sandwich was overcome at first, but then rubbed his eyes and
looked attentive. Stormont read the papers aloud and discussed them
with Thurlow and Germain, while Amherst sat awake but as usual
silent. The others then woke up and approved the proceedings.

This
may indite the business methods of the North Ministry and the general
habit of taking important decisions as an appendix to dinner...”

At
the time Britain was locked in war with two world Empires, fighting a
rebellious colony abroad, soon to start another fight with the Dutch
(because why not?) and was being regularly threatened with mass
invasion. It is a fucking miracle this country is still here.

There
are multiple occasions where the empire is in immediate danger and a
decision has to reached immediately but no-one can find the cabinet
because it's summer and they have gone home for the holidays. The
secretary of war, at one point, complains that he has only one day
per week for personal business. Excuding weekends.

Don't
fuck with the American secretary, he will draw on you bitch.

”The
occasion was seized by the Opposition to provoke Germain. Temple
Luttrell compared Burgoyne's conduct favourably with that of the
American Secretary, who he said had been promoted for disobedience
and cowardice. Two years earlier Germain had sat quiet under a
similar shower of Luttrell insults; but now he started up in a rage
and denounced him as an assassin of the most wretched character and
malice. 'Old as I am', he continued, 'and young as the hon. member, I
will meet that fighting gentleman and be revenged.' There was an
immediate uproar and two hours of confusion. Germain retracted, but
Luttrell had to be ordered into custody before the two men would
satisfy the House with an apology.”

The
French Fleet -

“Provisions
were low, the sick in the French ships equalled the healthy, and so
many dead were going overboard that Devon gave up eating fish.” - I
hope to Christ this means that they were freaked by the bodies
washing up and not that they were eating the bodies.

Rodney
– our most corrupt, lucky and most competent admiral

“Ones
view of Sir George Rodney depended on whether one was a politician, a
creditor or a friend. He was a sociable man. Women and play were his
pastimes; and his elegant, slightly effeminate presence was
well-known at the dinner table, voluble and indiscreet. Like Wolfe he
fought his future battles over the mahogany, always returning to his
favourite subject, which was Sir George Rodney.”

“Some
tiny grain of resolution had momentarily asserted itself in the Prime
Minister.”

“But
in strategy tidy arguments are usually achieved by ignoring the
complex of facts and guesses which form decisions.”

One
of the many strange inversions of the book is that you end up
respecting King George a lot more than you thought you would. The
leader of a corrupt system can be the least corrupt member of it.

It's
also the least whig
history history book I have ever read. It manages to reasonably
propose a strong alternative to events as they were but with enough
rigour to avoid collapsing into the abyss of counterfactuals.

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Water
laps the island rim. There is no bank or beach but only walls.
Upstream the river rises in rapids or waterfalls. Downstream it dives
beneath the touching stone. An arrow scratched, and the flow of air,
gives direction. The sump is d4 minutes long with d4 air pockets. The
island is a balancing boulder.

CLASS
IV RAPID DUNES

A
wide flat cave curved like letters C or J. A floor of sand.

The
river is a trickle. The dunes in sweeps and fans are damp and
waist-high. The cave will flood violently in d20+5 minutes and stay
flooded for d20 minutes. The cycle repeats. You leave wet crunching
tracks. So does anything else. Bodies and lost items washed away
might rest here for a while.

SUMP

The
water shows the way under the stone.

To
pass, dive and blackly search. Standard sump is d4 minutes long with
d4 air pockets. It will feel longer. Fear will kill you. You will
exit in blackness, wrap up a candle or a lamp for passage. Scratches
and signs may tell the way and time.

Calcite
columns so close only one can pass at a time. You climb through long
ellipses shaped like sleepy eyes. Echo's scatter and light gets
trapped fast. Use dropped coins or dice to map.

MARBLE
JAR

Imagine
a jar of marbles with an ant climbing through.

You
are the ant. Vast breakdown pile filling a shaft. House-sized
irregular rocks, car-sized gaps. Drafts or trailing smoke may lead
the way. You can drop down without climbing checks. Passage gaps in
every downward direction. Half have no way past.

HALL
OF THIRTEEN

A
cluster of vast defensible stalagmites in the centre of an open cave

The
cave is an irregular doughnut. Around 13 giant centre-columns
clustered close together can be got amongst and climbed. You can leap
from top to flattened top. There is something good up there. 10%
chance of a prison built in the centre column space.

ALE-POUR
RAPPEL

A
rappel shaped like thick liquid being poured from a curved glass.

That
image is the shape of the empty space. A curving lip, a drop straight
down. Wide first, then narrowing. In the middle a descender can pause
and 'chimney', back flat on one side and feet out on the other. Then
slowly widening again.. Fallers will hit the funnel and grab. Jumpers
may survive.

And
two re-writes in the hope of greater clarity.

A
SWIM GYM

A
path down through stone of shallow pools linked by streams.

A
narrow staircase in the rock. The 'steps' are 3d4 pools you can jump
between. 4 to 6 vertical feet. Swim/wade across. Anyone fighting can
grapple and throw themselves down into the next pool as a free
action, SO LONG AS THEY TAKE THE OTHER GUY WITH THEM.

FOUNTAIN
OF FONTESTORBE

A
smooth, saxaphone-shaped chamber. Valved, wet, regularly refills.

Flowing
and shaped like the inside of a wind instrument lying flat. Many tiny
exits. Puddles and pools. Living fish flap. Will refill, violently
and unstoppably every d30 minutes, them empty again. forever.

Saturday, 16 February 2013

Its very hard to find the correct balance between too little information and too much.

The first lines are to go in the table and provide and instant idea the DM can improvise with. The rest is to to somewhere else and be remembered or looked up very quickly when necessary.

I could add a lot more descriptive crap to each of these but it would make them weigh more in the head and harder to use so I don't know.

Names are chosen as a combination of instantly descriptive, colourful and re-memorable. You are not meant to use them talking to the players. There is only one Fountain of Fontestorbe but a hundred caves that do that thing.

A
SWIM GYM

Stepped
stone pools and streams. Fordable. Descending.

A
giant staircase. 3d4 pools. You can jump. 4 to 6 vertical feet.
Swim/wade across. Anyone fighting can grapple and throw themselves
down into the next pool as a free action, SO LONG AS THEY TAKE THE
OTHER GUY WITH THEM.

A
nightmare of irregular cracked rocks, waist-high full of water.
Imagine a bucket of smashed slates, piled. An ant to navigate them.
You are the ant. The path-walls grow face-close. You turn side-on.
Save against paralysis or freeze.

FOSSIL
WATER LAKE

A
plane of turquoise water, still and flat as glass.

Knee
high, hip high, chest high, neck high, then out. (Do not tell players
the depth.) The sky-coloured water makes you homesick and sad (the
only blue thing you'll see.)

NIGHTMARE
FALLS

Roaring
abyssal falls of unknowable depth.

A
waterfall plunging beyond the lanterns rays. No way to know the depth
before you climb. The sound drowns speech, no warning of sound. Ask
who the players are looking at.

SUPER-OOLITE
POOL

Clear,
deep water. Full of house-sized marbles.

You
can wade across this pool walking on the surface of the house-sized
hyper-oolites that rest in it. They are perfect spheres with the tops
almost breaching the surface. Draw circles and ask players where they
are. Leap/swim from sphere to sphere.

FOUNTAIN
OF FONTESTORBE

Smooth
valved chamber, wet and regularly refills.

Flowing
and curved like the inside of a brass wind instrument. Many tiny
exits. Puddles and pools. Living fish flap. Will refill, violently
and unstoppably every d30 minutes, forever.

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

I have been making monsters for
so long that many of you may have forgotten why I am making them.
Perhaps I have as well. I shall speak until I have reminded both of
us what I am doing and why.

This is long And rambles, and is long.

I am making a book called 'Veins
of the Earth' which is meant to be like Vornheim but for the
Underdark.

It is taking a LOT longer than I
thought. My capacity for work and amount of self-will is lower than I
thought. It takes me longer that I hoped to come up with good, or at
least semi-original ideas.

My principals for this blog are
generally about when not to blog something.

If someone has already done it.
Don't blog.

If its about RPG's and it's not
adding something to what is already there. Don't blog.

If its an opinion. Probably don't
blog.

If its an opinion about someone
else's opinion. DON'T BLOG.

Arguments are for understanding
things.

Don't get involved in an argument
unless you 1. are sure you know a lot about it and can add something
useful. 2. Are prepared to have your mind changed. And 3. Are
prepared to muster your energies and persist in the narrow gap
between almost-aggressive hyper-certainty and flaccid abandonment.

This means I rarely argue on the
internet.

One of the good, and shit, things
about the internet is that it is full of interesting and intelligent
people who have probably had most of your good idea's before you
have. The number of times I have had a powerful but half-formed idea
about something and then seen someone else make a well constructed
blog-post about it that makes the same point better than I would have
made it, (like here)
is beyond count. The number of times I have had an interesting
counter-argument to something and then seen someone else make the
same argument, better, and faster, is also large.

So what does this have to do with
monsters?

Nothing so far, why am I writing
it? I will go on.

The
Encounter Table

The central table is meant to be
an equivalent to the big city encounter table in Vornheim. The most
necessary part of the book. The part that if you were editing the
whole thing and doing sophie's choice with every page and you cut
everything away until there was only one thing left, then this would
be that thing.

The brief plan was this. Three
columns, fifty rows.

Column one is topographic cave
types. In Vornheim each of the encounters is carefully made. They are
almost like mini-plot hooks. In a city you can (usually) go around
anything you don't want to meet, so city encounters can't just be a
dangerous thing in the road, they need hooks. The Vornheim encounters
'stick' onto the PC's like velcro. If they engage, fine. If they
don't, there are usually consequences to not engaging. The plot will
come looking for you. In some the history of the game reforms so you
are already involved. That's 'your' friend in the cage, or 'your'
stuff the thieves stole.

But in caves this is quite
different. As opposed to freedom of movement they are defined by
dramatic loss of that freedom. In real caving almost all of the
effort is moving places the geography doesn't want you to go. The
deepest cave expeditions are generational. You cannot explore them in
one lifetime. If I made a cave adventure book like this it would be
sort-of-interesting an a very particular way and not at all what I
wanted.

So column one is to present the
kind of movement-challenges that might be encountered in caves but in
a toy-box way. That is, in a real cave journey it is much more likely
that the route you are following will end at a blank impassible wall.
Only very occasionally will you actually get somewhere. In the book,
it's meant to be the other way round. Each challenge is designed to
restrict or shape the movements of the group in some way. Its also
assumed that they can overcome this challenge. (Though it makes no
assumption as to how) It is not a true random geography generator in
which sometimes you are just fucked.

So Column one is cave types. This
will be the next thing I am doing on the blog. You can expect things
to be a lot less interesting around here as describing topographical
challenges in clear, short, game-applicable English is much less
charismatic than crazy monsters.

Column two is beauty, poetry and
strangeness. Reading a lot of books about cave exploration it seemed
evident to me that one of the most powerful things drawing explorers
was a kind of formless wonder that no-one involved ever clearly
describes. But it fills them up and animated them. (There is a part
in Ten Years Under The Earth where Nobert Casternet comes to the edge
of a waterfall no-one has seen before. He stares into the darkness
and cannot reall for how long, or in Fortnoys hisotry of the earth
where, descending the grand canyon he sees that a yellow sandstone
strata has billows of dunes and the footprints of ancient insects
written in the rock) Like sex in Dracula (the book) it's everywhere
but no-one talks about it. It was important to me that underground
spaces be beautiful in unexpected and powerful ways. This imaginative
energy also helps an old-school dm as it provides the unrefined fuel
for improvisation.

Column three is the living things
you encounter when you are in the cave with your movement restricted,
hopefully being deranged by the alien beauty.

My intention was originally that
you could open the book to this page and roll and encounter and just
start a game straight away, filling in the rest of the information
you need with the rest of the book as it came up.

I have failed in this intention.

The thing with Vornheim is that
if you open to the encounter table and roll an encounter, you don't
have to tit around with the rest of the book very much to work out
what happens. Its all right there on the page.

But my encounter table won't be
like that. Because I was obsessed with creating new monsters. Ones
no-one had done before, I had to describe them, to myself mainly, so
I understood them. People seemed to like that and I got a bit carried
away. Also, if you are making a new thing it takes a lot of words to
cart the fragile new ideas into someone else's head. Description.

So you won't be able to read my
encounter table and use it straight away because each of the living
things described in it is somewhat unlike any other monster you know
of. That means you either need to pause to look it up, or pre-read
the book. So I have kind-of fucked myself. I can live with it as the
new monsters are generally interesting enough to me to justify the
failure.

So how did I do? And what must
I do?

By my own standards.

If I have failed the test of
brevity, I think I have generally passed the test of originality.

A good monster has this-

It is an unexpected and powerful
idea which can be communicated in a few words. Geltatinous Cube is
the perfect example of this. Describes in two words. Impossible to
forget once you have heard it. Name forms a poetic paradox in your
head that locks it in place. Geltinous. Cube.

How many of these ideas have
this? Some. I think. Many do not.

Another problem with originality
is that the intention is not to describe things directly but to put
them inside the head of the DM who will then describe them to other
people. You are not making a normal form of art, you are making a
virus. It is not to be looked at, it is to infect people, go inside
them and then they do actions round a game table with other people.
These actions cannot be predicted but they are the real monster, not
the description in the book.

This happens in three stages.

Firstly you fill the head of the
DM with imaginative energy. This makes them want to run the monsters
and to be in that world.

Secondly, you give them simple
direct things the monsters can actually do when they interact with
the players, this means when the DM is frantic, distracted and
dealing with a lot of shit they have a simple behavioural/aesthetic
'handle' on the beast so they can have it do things in the game
straight away. (You could write for careful DM's who account for
everything in advance and o not franticly need stuff during the game
but that's not the kind of person I am so not really who I am
imagining. It suggests the DM was in too much control of events, that
what they expected to happen is what actually did happen, which is a
kind of silent failure)

Thirdly, these interactions are
carefully modulated and planned ahead so they don't fuck each other
up and send the game spinning.

Obviously the third concern is
almost irrelevant for Old school DM's, it's a kind of 4th
Ed worry (which they dealt with quite well). But most of my creations
need work on one or both of the first and second things. Eventually
the third column should have a name, a brief sensory description to
tell the DM how the PC's sense and encounter the living thing it
describes, and a brief behavioural note so they know what it is
likely to do in the first seconds. Check the beastiary for full
description.

So. Some are underwritten, but
the idea is there. Will have to go back and punch them up a bit
later.

Many are vaguely powerful ideas
but with little to connect them to the playing experience. Or are
overwritten.

Also

Zack
Smith asked if I was doing dungeons for any of these. I intend to.
The idea is a kind of one-page dungeon equivalent for each of the
intelligent races. They are going to be based on a kind of
underground silk-road (so the players have a good economic reason to
go long distances) Each dungeon would actually be a kind of trading
post/dungeon/mystery/fight. Like an American TV show where every week
holy shit a new mystery to solve oh crap the rocks are alive oh god a
a bear crushed chad to death after it set him on fire run oh shit but
they left diamonds in this obsidian crypt sweet. And DM's can string
them together as they wish.

Magic
items and trade goods with Archean and deep-earth silicon chemistry
will be really hard. I may need to get a new stack of books just for
that.

Statistics.

Humanoid things you can have a
conversation with – Seven?

Fungal or symbiotically fungal –
Five.

Small things but big – Ten.

Predators from outside space and
time – Three.

Ancient culture gone horribly
wrong – Eight.

Made from rock (sort of) –
Seven.

Draws creative energy from the
depth of geological time – eight.

Lessons
learnt.

I peaked around Christmas with
the AntiPhoenix and the Archeans. Maybe it was the solitude and the
time off work that did it.

If you write an entry in poetry
it will be massively unpopular and actually reduce hits around it
like a crack house bringing down prices. I REGRET NOTHING.

Naming things after German forms
of light makes them hard to invent and paradoxically unpopular.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is an
excellent poet. For some reason I like the religious parts at the end
less than the rest, this seems somehow unfair to Hopkins. Like I'm
robbing him.

It's hard to concentrate on one
thing for an hour.

I need to manage my time better.

I need more focus and
self-control.

It takes a LOT of books to fuel a
good idea.

(maybe I like reading too much
and have let it become a form of prevarication)

If you want cave explorations
that read like thrillers or military expeditions, go to the
Americans, if you want poetry and wonder you need the Europeans.

Sunday, 10 February 2013

'Massey,
at the centre of a cluster of soldiers, removed from his pack a
bottle of wine. Massey's pack looked like a launcher of ground-to-air
missiles. He began his refresher course with his tire-bouchon,
raising the cork. He ran it past his nose, and unbuttoned his breast
pocket, reaching for his little glass. “The purpose of the Section
de Renseignments is to eliminate uncertainty,” he said, addressing
no-one in particular, expecting nothing in return – erupting with
mock instructions and aping the tone of an officer, as he often does,
apparently to enjoy the sound as it raps the air.'

'The
patrols of the Renseignements walk in the unoccupied territory
between the battalion and the enemy. They circle high behind enemy
lines. Since the mountains are real and the enemy is not there tends
to be a certain diminution of energy during a refresher course –
particularly on the part of those who go out on patrol, in contrast
to those who stay in the command post and think of things for the
patrols to do. Essentially, the people in the command posts are
editors, trying to make sense of the information presented by the
patrols, and by and large the patrols are collections of
miscellaneous freelancing loners, who lack enthusiasm for the
millitary enterprise, have various levels of antipathy to figures of
authority, and, in a phrase employed by themselves and their officers
alike, are “the black sheep of the army.”'

'Jean-Bruno
Wettstein, as a result of his first repetition course, was among the
select who were invited to seek promotion. He went to a doctor
instead. He said he had no desire to command anything and did not
believe in the army. He said he could not accept the phenomenon of
war, believing it to be “absurd and stupid.” The doctor told him
that if he was not careful he would be coded psycho in federal files
and the label would hamper him for the rest of his life. The doctor
wrote a letter that emphasized both Wettstein's sanity and the
extreme difficulty he seemed to have in accepting authority.
Wettstein was excused from the army for two years. He went to Gascony
and worked with goats. “We were going to change the world,”
Wettstein said of himself and others. “But the world did not
change, and we did.” Eventually, when he rejoined the battalion, he
was, in his words, “almost automatically put into Renseignements.”'

Saturday, 9 February 2013

Every
underground culture uses the Myconids as slaves. They are useful,
alien and usually easy to control. A workforce and a prime source of
rare organics. It's obvious the their minds are nothing like ours.
The things they call personalities are just learnt behaviour over an
intelligent alien core.*

There
is a market in slaves and a fungal-underground railroad leading
who-knows-where.

Slavehunting
is valued and expected work. Helping them escape is dangerous, weird
and poorly paid. But there rumours of strange irregular fungal gifts.

These
are some you might bump into.

D20

1.
Hunched, dead-leaf-brown. Five feet high. Talks in a low
towel-muffled semi-inaudible voice. Shuffles on invisible feet like a
peasant woman carrying sticks. Mushroom frills reach a ragged hem
down to to the ground. The frills rise up and fold away into the
topknot of a fat low-level monster. An orc, goblin, something simple,
stupid and common. A different one each time the frills fold. A
shapechanger. A visionary. Sees the future in palsied raptures.
Cunning.

2.
Like a knotted oaken trunk, as high as a man. Waving white pencil
thin tendrils. Piercing captivating eyes hidden in the oaky folds.
Highly charismatic (18) A Propagandist, raconteur and stirrer of the
mob. More CHA than CON, more CON than WIS.

3.
Pale and multiply crooked like a twig stripped of bark by a child and
broken and re-broken in the hand. Wet, white unclothed flesh (none of
them have clothes but this one seems
naked). Eyes like sputtering blue-halo coals in a failing gas fire.
Ruthless. Murderous. Freedom-obsessed. No strategic vision. Will kill
when necessary and when not.

4.
White like paper on a rainy day. Sagging in the same way, like wet
clothes. Always seems on the verge of falling over. A trim, round
black crown, horizontally held and neatly rimmed like a black hat.
Shakes and quivers always. Non-violent but utterly utterly morally
certain. Right to the dark end of all things. Will not break.

5.
Faded orange like fallen fruit. Strange prominent eyes, buggy and
glass-like. Tightly drawn skin. A conical beaver-brown mushroom crown
with a flattened top lends it vertical length. Heroic, intelligent
and perceptive. Will die to protect it's fellows. Is days away from a
nervous breakdown. Talks educated like a person, piping voice.

7.
A dusty-black crooked stem. A pale white cap, fizzy and lightly
frizzed. Grows fruit from its body. Not like anything you've seen but
edible and non-poisonous. Weird wild rainbow coloured fruit. No
psychedelic effects. Clever, inventive and a passive-aggressive
bully.

8.
Plump and ridiculous like a Toby Jug. Big, mad smiling trunk-face.
Rolls and eases around. A wit that never wounds, endless patience for
the stupid and the slow, empathic and forgiving. Lacks any real will
to make a difficult decision.

9.
Bright red with flecks of metallic gold. It's not blood but it may as
well be. Ramrod-straight 90 degree stem. Aggressive, deceptive,
charming. Totally untrustworthy. Focused like a laser on one
particular goal. Will kill, lie and betray to reach it. A sociopath

10.
Blue-black in waves like paint in old ink. Beautiful in a way.
Up-turned crown like a parasol in the wind. Wise, myopic. Full of
good advice, more full of criticism. Of you. Will offer intelligent
and perceptive suggestions one third of the time. The other two
thirds will be taken up with a forensic, accurate and cutting
criticism of everything you say, do and are.

12.
Slender and blue-white. Always seems leaning forwards. Shroom-frill
one one side only, ragged and bare on the other. Bare side has a
photo-lumescent cyst. Highly intelligent, an expert healer of
disease, not wounds. Seems like it has severe aspergers but how do
you judge that in a mushroom?

13.
Heavy, lead, colour and mass. Four feet high. Slumps and bumps along
on a tangle of blood red mycellium limbs like tumbleweed stalks. Has
total faith in the authorities. Is sure everything will be worked out
very soon. Can emit terrifying chlorine gas that kills everything
around. Valued highly by everyone as it can also fix nitrogen in soil
using its red tentacles. Agricultural value beyond compare.
Seriously.

14.
Civilised, cultured, well-read and sympathetic. Wants to eat your
nervous system and pilot your body around for laughs. Unlike
everything else here, will usually be encountered riding the body of
some low-level goon it infected. Skull is swollen, white puffs of
fungus flesh poking out where they eyes should be and out of the
gaping mouth. (25% chance is a very obvious slave-hunting double
agent.)

15.
A heaving grey pipe-organ thing with almost-golden threads rioting
from its crown. The shroom-pipes make amazing sound. Can create
arrangements of totally bizarre but utterly wonderful underground
music. (Genius level) Like dark prog music if prog wasn't a bit shit
and if attractive people danced to it. Very very very racist against
everything.

16.
Violent pink spore mother carrying living young. Scraps of stolen
armour wired around her bulging sacs. Aggressive, apparently in
defence of her young but, in reality will sacrifice all of them to
save herself if necessary.

17.
Wise, shrivelled teacher of fungal ways. Patient, motionless most of
the time. Flesh wrinkled up like old people in the bat. Little bright
black button eyes. Will teach you fungal kung-fu. Utterly useless
chemical skill unless you can emit your own spores.

18.
Chippy, cheeky flat-topped mushroom. Can infect you and change your
gender, but only if you're into that. Can't really do anything else.
Can't change you back without killing you. Massively illegal in Drow
lands because YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH THE SYSTEM.

19.
Friendly wood-grained alcho-shroom. Ferments its own booze inside.
Like a walking chemical factory. Sloshes and staggers like a barrel
being manoeuvred down an uneven slope. Always seems late. Likes
making friends.

20.
Pale thin shroom with a head like a q-tip. Just a vague hazing of
stubbly hair-thin growths up there. Wanders around feeling diffident
and isolated. Sorrowful and bent over like something sagging in the
wind. Brightens up in company. Licking its head sends you into a coma
and gives you the ability to write poetry. Bad poetry.

*
Or ARE they?! Maybe a very special episode of Veins of the Earth
about TOLERANCE* and how we are ALL THE SAME under the skin????

*But
then again maybe not. They are fucking mushrooms after all. Depends
how you run the game.

Friday, 8 February 2013

You
won't notice the stalagmites. Not at first. They don't descend from
above, they just.. appear. One moment not, next moment there. Ancient
weathered claws grasping the earth. Heron legs or curlicued eagle
claws built on titanic scale.

You
might hear the crunch as they bite into the ground. Look down where
rock meets rock and see the scored and broken stone. Clawed and
bunched like a crows feet on a dining table. There are two. One
blocks the way ahead, one arrests your flight. You won't see either
move on arrival. You will look up. The light will make it impossible
not to.

The
roof is gone. If it was low enough to see before it isn't now. As if
it rose up. Like paperscraps dancing in a lantern flame. The light
you carry runs out somewhere in the dark. But there is something else
up there. A twice-reflected gleam. Only as bright as the shine of
gold in cold vaults. Lead tiles in moonlight. A scratched blackboard
bouncing back the streetlamp light refracted in a pane of glass.
Illuminating nothing. It is an eye.

You
see a figure falling in the dark. Silver-white like a dropped spoon
in water-butt. Distant and untouchable as a lake-bottom corpse. A
human shape. Far far above you, but deeply held like underwater
lights. Falling. Rising. Approaching you like a skydiver with a
failed chute. Or like a body rising up out of dark sea into the
light. But fast. And direct. Impelled by something.

It
looks like you. At first a sliver human-sketch. Then a skeletal
cartoon. A formless body. Features. A face. Your face. All resolving
as it falls out of the dark. This takes five to three seconds in
total.

It
breaches the barrier screaming. The dark void-stuff above you shivers
and ripples. The silver-feathered-clone-you-thing plunges out of the
impossible sky exactly like a spear plunging into a pool. A frothing
halo of nought-bubbles slide around it as it comes and then flee
upwards. Time and space forming bubbles of reality around something
else that will not mix.

It
comes down screaming and grabs at you. This would be a good time to
fight. It doesn't move like anything attached to this world. It goes
up and down in jabs and drops. Like a harpoon seeking river-fish.
Like the tip of a weapon. Which is what it is. Grabbing for you. The
feathers are knives.

It
will become more like you with each stroke. If it succeeds. There
will be a flurry of feather-like silver blades. You will be pulled
upwards into the darkness to feed the watching horror. Wailing. Your
naked evil silver-skinned double will remain. Abandoned. Murderous.
Desperate. A Still-Tor-Man.

You
can try and fight the stone-like feet that anchor the watching
overpredator. They are hard to hurt, quick and massively strong. But
while you occupy on or move of them the predator cannot jab its
thinking beak into reality to nab you up. They will crush and tear
you but at least they won't take you up there.

Veins of the Earth Hardcopy

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FIRE ON THE VELVET HORIZON

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